In the South, the Republican Party had few followers, no leaders, and no political candidates during the 1950s. Yet, politics began to shift. The Democratic Party started to identify as the party for civil rights activism, while the Republican Party began to stray from the traditional party of Lincoln, which abolished slavery. In Congress, Republicans voted toward civil rights legislation, but outside the capital, the party moved from identifying with equal rights to sympathizing with and focusing on white voters.1
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged school segregation in court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, which shook the very foundation of Jim Crow segregation. The separate but equal ruling from Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) no longer had a place in the educational system. The court ordered integration by school districts with “all deliberate speed,” which the Border States complied with while states in the Deep South, like Georgia, resisted. It was not until 1968 that the Supreme Court declared “all deliberate speed” meant “all at once.”2 This ruling brought outrage from Georgia politicians. The General Assembly soon created a bill to charge any school or its leaders with two years in prison if they put funding towards integrating schools.3 Even with this ruling, in 1970, more than 18% of African American children were still in segregated schools.4